Cheers everyone!
In search of a tool to easily bypass the windows mixer and get a WASAPI output for all sound sources, I nearly gave up before discovering JRiver. I read through the wiki, but to be honest I'm still not completely sure if JRiver is exactly the thing I was looking for.
Here's my situation:
I'm running a Windows 10 HTPC, which I use for:
Gaming (Steam mostly)
Movies/Series/Concert (Kodi)
TV (German Windows 10 App "Zattoo")
The PC is hooked up via HDMI (GTX 1070) to a Yamaha RX-V381 (soon to be upgraded to a 581 for Presence Speakers) with a 5.1 speaker setup.
On to my problem:
I want to use the Yamaha DSP programs to convert 2.0 sound up to 5.1 and later 7.1 with Front Presence. This works perfectly with Kodi, which uses WASAPI to bypass the Windows mixer. 5.1 are played as is, while stereo sources get upmixed. This doesn't work with sound outside of Kodi though. Windows sound settings are set up as 5.1, which works perfectly fine for all the games packing surround sound. Games with stereo sound, videos in the webbrowser and audio from the TV app, which are all stereo, are still sent as a 5.1 stream to the AVR, which then can't correctly apply its DSP.
What I'm looking for was a method to have each audio source (stereo as well as surround, games as well as browser video, ...) have its unaltered channel configuration etc. be sent to the AVR, to always have the DSP programs correctly applied to it. And from how I understand it, JRiver could be the solution to this.
Is that right? Or am I understanding something about JRiver completely wrong?
Thanks in advance! :-)